


say i’m better than you left me

by gabolange



Category: City Homicide (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Character Study, Claudia / Simon but only sort of, F/M, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:28:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28129902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gabolange/pseuds/gabolange
Summary: Five times Claudia doubts herself, and one time she doesn’t.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 6





	say i’m better than you left me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pellucid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pellucid/gifts).



> A belated birthday gift for pellucid, who wanted Claudia's story. She also kindly beta-read her present. Any errors are my own.

***

1\. Claudia isn’t surprised that she can’t sleep. People react two ways to trauma: fight or flight. They shut down or their minds race between memories, both hiding from and piecing together what happened, finding a narrative that makes it make sense. She is the kind of person to toss and turn with the what-ifs.

Just yesterday, Daniel Worthington tied her to the bed and tried to rape her. Detective Mapplethorpe’s intervention was welcome but messy, and in the struggle, Claudia grabbed her gun and shot him. Shot him again and again and again. She remembers the feel of the gun in her hand, the smell of his breath on her cheek. She wonders at how stupid she had been to taunt him and not think, not even for a minute, that he would come after her. He would have been scot free in three hours, on a plane to Kuwait. He should have just left, but he couldn’t, could he? And she had missed it.

She tosses in her hotel room bed–Claudia’s house is a crime scene and a complete mess, and she can’t go back there until it’s clear and clean–and wonders what it would have taken not to be duped. Which priors should she have reconsidered? Which part of her profile was wrong? Not much, it didn’t have to be very wrong, just enough–.

Enough that now she’s a victim, will be told to take some time off, seek counseling, make sure she’s ready to come back. It’s advice she gives all the time, to cops who get shot or beaten or just rattled by the job. Take a breather, time will give you perspective.

She gave that advice to Simon, not so long ago. She had missed so much there, too. Missed everything, she thinks now, at least of what mattered. She hadn’t seen how bad it had gotten, that he would assault witnesses and lie, that he would sit home with his gun and lie, that–she must admit now–he could have killed someone and lied. 

A week ago, she would have said that was impossible. Absolutely. She knew his mental state, knew his demeanor, knew him. Simon, everybody’s feisty pain in the ass little brother, whom they tolerated because he got results, whom they liked because he reminded them of the assholes they’d been not so long ago. Simon, who was wicked smart and knew it, who was always a step ahead but used that intelligence for good. Or at least that’s what she used to think.

Now Claudia wonders if her profile was wrong. To take the law into your own hands requires narcissism, requires sociopathy. Simon was self-centered in the way of many hotshot cops, but–. Claudia stares at the ceiling and pulls the terrible blanket closer over her body. Was she blinded by friendship? They had been friends, in their own way, and Claudia is not so naive to ignore both the attraction between them and the ability it gave him to manipulate her, and her to manipulate him.

He told her he was doing fine, and she believed him. She told him she would help him, and he believed her. She wonders now if he abused her trust, and by how much. She was willing to lie to him, but now cannot tell how willing she was to be lied to.

She wonders what else she has missed. Simon. Daniel Worthington. Are there others? Does she need to go back through case files, old profiles, psych evaluations, all of it? Would it help? Or is it just a response to the weight of Worthington’s body near hers, the cold metal of the gun in her hand? 

She’s killed someone now, and she thinks that makes her too much like the men she profiles, the ones she tries to catch and the ones she works with day in and day out. Her cops are not so different from her killers, sometimes, and today as both a cop and a killer, Claudia wonders if she’s missed so much because she hadn’t understood either nearly as well as she thought.

Claudia sighs and stares into the dark room. She will not sleep tonight.

**

2\. All police-involved shootings are the same, in their way. The officer is put on leave with pay pending the outcome of an inquiry into whether the use of a weapon was justified, and the outcome of a psychological evaluation into whether the officer is fit to return to duty.

The inquiry into Detective Buchanan’s shooting of William Clegg will be over and done with almost immediately. There were thirty witnesses, including the Homicide squad and the local press, and it was as clean as these things ever are. The investigation is a formality at most, and everyone knows it. Claudia thinks the psych eval should be thorough regardless, but Buchanan does not want to be in her office.

“Look,” he says, “I know why we have to do this, and I appreciate it.” He’s infuriatingly genial. “But I would like to get back to work.” 

“You’ve only been out two days,” Claudia tells him. “You don’t need more time?” There’s a refrain there she doesn’t like, that old advice that doesn’t work: just take a breather, it will all be fine. But she knows it really can help to have a small break before diving back into the fray. 

“No,” Buchanan says, shaking his head like he’s refusing a cup of tea. “I’m good.”

Claudia nods. “You’re good. No nightmares, no concerns about having to do this again tomorrow?”

“Are you asking me if it keeps me up at night?” Buchanan asks, and she shrugs slightly to encourage him to continue. “I didn’t want to shoot him,” he says. “Everyone who was there would tell you that.”

“Does it bother you that you had to?” Claudia asks, pushing a little bit. He’s always been hard to read, Nick Buchanan. He puts on a temper for show in the interview box, but she’s never seen him truly angry. He’s happy to play dumb with suspects to draw them out, pulling out that complacent smile that he hints at now, an easy mask. He’s friendly with the team, and friendlier still with Mapplethorpe. He’s a good cop with good instincts, but unlike the rest of them–those men like Simon who flash with outrage–Buchanan keeps everything close to the vest. 

“Of course,” he says, looking her in the eye. She can see here that he’s a good interviewer, willing to play her game, give her just enough. “You never want to have to shoot someone. Especially someone like that.”

“Someone like–.”

Buchanan almost rolls his eyes, as if she’s missing the point. “A grieving father.” He sits forward. “Look, Senior Sergeant,” he says, “I hated it. It was a tough day. But it’s not the first in this job, and it won’t be the last.”

Claudia nods to concede that point. “And what do you do to shake off the bad days?” she asks. “Friends? Girlfriend? Hobbies?” 

He shrugs, and that wide-eyed unruffled look settles firmly over his face. Claudia wonders what he might be hiding when he says, “I get stuff done around the house.” She could ask him. She could ask him if he hangs out after work with any of the guys. She could ask him if he even noticed he and Mapplethorpe were sharing coffee the other day, trading it back and forth casually, like partners of another sort.

She should ask him. It would disrupt the whole organization if there was a romantic relationship on the team–but Buchanan wouldn’t answer, and everyone else would laugh. Those two? Impossible to imagine, that the tenured, boring, hard-working pair they have become would flaunt the rules like that. No one would believe her. She wouldn’t believe herself. 

Impossible to imagine–it’s her job to imagine the impossible because it ensures that the men and women who sometimes kill to keep the public safe are healthy and capable of making hair-trigger decisions. 

But she doesn’t want to, not now. She doesn’t want to ask him and get another stonewalled, pleasant answer. She doesn’t want to see what that future might mean for him, for Mapplethorpe, for Homicide. It isn’t ready for another scandal. Claudia isn’t, either.

Claudia should ask, but she doesn’t. “Okay,” she says, and Buchanan seems a little surprised at her nod. “You’re free to go. I’ll sign off on your return paperwork.” 

“Senior Sergeant,” he says, and is out the door immediately. Claudia watches him go, suddenly so tired of men with guns and secrets, of having to profile her colleagues, of second guessing everything she’s told. Maybe she’s the one who needs the break.

**

3\. Claudia doesn’t come here often. It’s a basement dive like so many others, with nothing but fading rainbow paint on the iron railing to tell passers-by what they might find. She found it by accident once, years ago, meandering the city on a long afternoon. 

She visits now on the days when she can’t face the raucousness of the cop bar, can’t handle the whiskey bar where she has picked up perhaps too many men, can’t stomach anything but gentle hands and welcoming faces. She’s brought a few women home from here over the years, good nights, but mostly she comes for the refuge. 

The bar is thick old wood, and Claudia rests heavily against it and orders her usual. “Wasn’t expecting to see you here,” a familiar voice says, and Claudia turns. She is trying to hide from the world, but she can’t help but smile at Ronnie’s gentle inquiry.

Claudia tilts her glass with a shrug. “We all have our secrets,” she says and swallows the irony with her whiskey.

“Or just the things we don’t talk about at work,” Ronnie answers, sliding onto the stool next to her. “Not anybody’s business. Doesn’t make it a secret.” Claudia nods and doesn’t say that it’s her job to know everyone’s secrets, or intuit them. She peers into the dark corners of everyone’s psyche, drawing insight from intuition and training and too many years of untangling lies. She wonders what secrets Simon didn’t tell her, if there was one–just one–that might have changed the outcome.

She knows Ronnie’s gay, but that’s not a secret. It’s not anyone’s business, but it’s certainly nothing the pathologist hides. Ronnie talks occasionally about her partner and jokes about having been married to a man but knowing better now. But she surely keeps things from all of them, not least the demons that must follow someone who has lived the kind of life she has.

“I’m thinking about leaving,” Claudia says after a long moment. She sips at her drink. “Just. Does the job ever get to you?” She has asked this question a hundred times of a hundred cops, but it is the first time she is asking for herself.

Ronnie tilts her head. “Of course,” she says easily. “I think it gets to all of us in our own ways.” 

Simon, beating a suspect with a chain. Duncan, nearly fired for insubordination. Matt, pursuing his career with unhealthy focus. Wolfe and the drink, Jarvis and–well, Claudia doesn’t know and doesn’t want to. The list is long and perpetual, and none of them escape unscathed. 

She thought she might, once. It wasn’t that she was naive or inexperienced–she’d come to this job with years of psychological work behind her, and training before that. But the profiling was always done on a consulting basis–the outside expert brought in to give evidence, provide perspective on this rapist or that kidnapper. But she’d never before worked so closely with one team, counseled them, cheered them on, become integral to both their success at solving cases and their success at surviving them.

It’s too much, Claudia can see now. She peers at Ronnie, who is watching her with a gentle look of understanding. “What specifically gets to you?” Claudia asks, and almost laughs. She can’t turn it off, the need to inquire, to probe, to understand.

But Ronnie doesn’t appear to mind. She shrugs. “The kids,” she says. “Always the kids.”

“Yeah,” Claudia says. She doesn’t spend much time with the victims, really. By the time Claudia gets to these cases, the victims are just fodder for her profiles, puzzle pieces to help her understand the men and women who have killed them. She likes to think she uses their stories and deaths for good, but she will never understand them like Ronnie does. Instead she understands the worst of humanity, the men who maim and rape and take and kill. 

“It ever bother you enough to quit?” Claudia asks.

“Oh,” Ronnie says, shaking her head. “No. I wouldn’t know what else to do, you know?” She glances down at Claudia, considering her gently. “But someone like you has options.” With that, Ronnie finishes her drink in a swallow and nods toward the door, where a woman Claudia doesn’t recognize has just stepped in. “I gotta go,” Ronnie says. “But take care of yourself, okay?”

Claudia nods, and doesn’t watch her colleague walk away. 

**

4\. She puts in for leave and flies to Phuket. Claudia told Simon she loved it, but the truth is that she’s never been. Now, she wonders if he has, if he chose it for his fake holiday backstory because he intended to go or because he knows the island well enough to make the lie sound real.

Her first day there, Claudia walks the promenade in Patong and takes in the sights. She can see why Simon might like it, why anyone might like it. Hot sun on beautiful beaches, women in bikinis and men in sarongs, free-flowing drinks, cheap food–it’s a tropical paradise. But the beach is crowded with tourists–Swedish kids on their gap year, Aussie honeymooners, Americans somehow louder than her own countrymen, Chinese sunbathers by the dozen–and Claudia finds herself suddenly overwhelmed.

What is she doing here? Taking the holiday she needs and deserves, that’s what she told her superintendent when he asked where she was headed. And it’s true, in its own way–take a break has become her mantra. When she looked at the board in Homicide and felt nauseated at the sight of the victim, when she spent another night in her guest room because she couldn’t face her own bed, when she thought of Simon marching out of Homicide into the unknown, it was there, that not-quite-solution she couldn’t shake: take a break.

And now that Claudia is here, she barely knows why.

She wanders away from the main drag and finds an old man in an auto rickshaw. “Take me somewhere quiet,” she says, and perhaps the look on her face is enough to still any perverse commentary. She doesn’t know how long they drive, but the crowds fade and the greenery grows. She stumbles out of the cab next to a sign for a waterfall.

She doesn’t want to follow the muddy path, so instead she wanders back down the road she drove in on. There is no one else, no traffic, and it would be easy to worry, but they passed a town not so far back. Around her, the trees are heavy and warm–it is the dry season, there probably isn’t a waterfall, at least not right now–but Claudia leans into the humidity and lets the feel of sweat soak her skin.

The last time she took time off she spent it in Brisbane at her sister-in-law’s baby shower. Before that she remembers a long weekend in Sydney, a sea of bars and hands and faces that radiated want. At the time it felt thrilling, and now Claudia shivers to think what could have happened. Despite everything she knew about people, it never occurred to her to be cautious–because, perhaps, she knew so much about people, she trusted herself to know when something might go wrong.

She’d call herself foolish, but the ego is what allows her to be good at her job. The confidence, that edge her father once called brash, not intending a compliment but giving one just the same–it’s how she has survived in the job and the world. Most of the men she worked with have called her a bitch behind her back. 

Did she make herself take this break to regain her confidence? Or to wonder if she should? Claudia kicks a rock with the toe of her sandal and it skitters down the hot road, bumping unevenly. She’s not wearing the right shoes for this excursion, this ride to nowhere she insisted she take.

She wonders what Simon would think of this place. He would have stayed back on the promenade, sipping a pina colada, fully embracing the opportunity to be a tourist, to ogle the girls. He would never be here, not on this road, in this weather. He would have laughed at the idea and said if she wanted quiet she should go back to the resort, have a massage, a glass of wine. 

Claudia doesn’t know if she imagines him as her conscience or a bad ex she just can’t quit. She shouldn’t think of him as often as she does, shouldn’t wonder what might happen if she ran into him and told him about how she went to Phuket because he didn’t.

She needs to get him out of her head. She needs to get the job and death and men out of her head. That, she tells herself, is why she is here. Nothing else or more or less. The break she needs, Claudia thinks, and walks on.

**

5\. The party is ostensibly for her. A going away do, someone had said, as if she hadn’t been more away than not these last few months, as if anyone would miss her. Claudia knows it is an excuse for drinks, for tired men and women to unwind. Any excuse will do, sometimes, and she is willing enough to serve. 

She sips her beer quietly, nodding and smiling at everyone who acknowledges her. Claudia looks for Homicide, the team she knows best, the ones who might be her friends, but there must be a case. There will always be another case, another murder, another day just like the one before, and Claudia has decided she can’t do it anymore. Not as often, not with the same people she is tasked to keep well.

A man leans against the bar, and before Claudia can nod, he says, “So that’s it, then? You’re out?”

Claudia turns and raises her glass. “That’s right, Sergeant Ryan,” she says, looking over her former colleague. Matt wears the last year heavily, his shoulders slumping with a new fatigue. She has heard how poorly his new role is going–was always going to go–but Claudia wonders how much of Simon he carries, how much he pushes himself and his crew to perfection because of everything that went before.

“Ah, good on you,” Ryan says, but his voice is heavy.

She can’t help it, the reflex to push past the misery that hangs over him. “Do you really think so?” she asks, and Ryan flinches at the question.

“Yeah,” he says. “Of course.” He turns and looks out at the clusters of cops throughout the bar, everyone clutching a cheap beer. “I guess this job gets to people,” he observes, mostly to the room. “Easier to walk away than stick it out.”

Claudia can hear the accusation, though she knows it isn’t for her. _Taking the easy way out_ , Ryan might have said, as if destroying his life and taking his career with it is the only honorable choice. It’s a belief they all fall into, and if she gives Simon credit for anything, it’s for turning his back and walking away. She knows how hard that had to be.

Her superintendent had given her a hard look, demanded if she was sure about all this. “Of course not,” Claudia had said, and she should have lied, because now that truth lingers over every conversation she has about her career and her future.

Claudia doesn’t answer, and Ryan gulps at his beer and tries to recover. “Where you headed?” he asks. “Sorry if I missed it, we’ve been–.” He waves a hand in the direction of the office.

“I’m going to consult,” Claudia says, cutting him off. “A lot of the smaller organizations need profiling services.” It’s what she used to do, and everything she hated about it now feels like exactly what she wants. “And I’m going to open a private practice.” 

“For who?” Ryan asks, the aggressive tinge lingering in his voice.

Claudia isn’t sure about this part, either, but she has to try. “Victims of rape,” she says. She hopes she isn’t doing it to expunge her own guilt about avoiding Daniel Worthington, or to purge the trauma she still feels when she sees a rubber mask. She hopes this choice–specific, a little outside her previous areas of focus–allows her to do one the thing she can’t within her specialty: help the victims while there’s still time.

“Oh,” Ryan says, startled. Something he didn’t see coming–he has to get better at that if he wants to improve as an interrogator, Claudia thinks, and then smiles at herself. Old habits. She might break that one for good one day, but she isn’t sure how hard she’ll try. In her reverie, Claudia almost misses Ryan’s genuine, “Good for you.” 

She clinks her glass against his. “Thanks, Matt,” Claudia says, and lets him fade back into the crowd. She will miss them, the cops she carries even when she doesn’t want to. She could try to keep in touch, but even if any of them were friends, she thinks it will be better if she doesn’t. 

Better to let this chapter recede and take their quirks and challenges with it. Better not to remember Ryan’s terrible choices, or Buchanan’s steady avoidance, or even Kingston’s impossible determination. Better to forget Mapplethorpe losing her gun in Claudia’s bedroom, better to forget all of Simon’s lies and all of his truths.

It’s time to put this all behind her.

**

5 + 1. She runs into him at a yoga retreat. Well, it’s worse than that: she runs into him at a yoga retreat her sister-in-law had talked her into because it would be relaxing and besides, the instructors, Claire said, were super hot. 

And here is Simon. Teaching yoga to middle-aged women at a fake ashram in the suburbs.

Claudia makes it through the class, barely. The five years of meditation practice and therapy let her pretend his voice is just like any other she has heard, the calm incantation of the sequences, the gentle reminders about breath and posture. She doesn’t laugh at the absurdity of it all, because she recognizes immediately that he is good at this. He tailors his comments to his students’ capabilities, gently reorienting himself and them over the course of an hour. He asks before he touches. He smiles in exactly the right way to give everyone the impression they came for: the instructors are hot and knowledgeable, perfect fantasy material for a weekend away from husbands and teenagers and life.

It suits him.

The class concludes with breathing exercises, and after, Claudia climbs to her feet and approaches him at the front of the room. “Hey stranger,” Claudia says. “Long time.”

“It has been,” Simon says, flashing a wry and still familiar smile as he ducks his head. He didn’t expect to see her here, but Claudia thinks he might be pleased by the surprise. “How you been?”

“Pretty good,” Claudia says, shifting her weight. He’s looking at her openly, with so little of the defensiveness she remembers that Claudia finds herself sharing, “I left not long after you did.”

Simon laughs at that. “It wasn’t the same without me?” he says, and the tone of the jibe reminds her of their old easy flirting, skirting around the edge of something that shouldn’t be there.

Claudia shakes her head. “Not really,” she says, and she intends to match his ease, but it comes out a little ruefully, too honest. Still, it’s been five years for both of them, and she doesn’t want to tell that story, not anymore. “You keep up with any of the old gang?” she asks instead. 

Simon raises his eyebrows at her dodge–he still reads people far too well–but he gives her the out. “A little,” he says. “Duncan texts twice a year.” He nods then, a small smile forming at the corner of his mouth with the chance to share news with someone who might care; he was always a gossip as much as a flirt. “Nick and Jen got married. Have a coupl’a kids, I hear.”

Claudia barks a laugh. “Of course they do,” she says, shaking her head but letting the news sit gently. She’s glad the first thing Simon shared was good news–maybe that means that the time has been good to all of them, though she knows that can’t be true. But the years have been kind to Simon, she can see that, and she should not be surprised to find herself so relieved.

But she knows there were so many ways his story could have gone, and too many of the scenarios she played over in her head involved him dead, or drunk, or drugged to the gills. She had refused to let herself look him up, but it had taken over a year before she stopped turning over every possible outcome as she fell asleep.

Something of this must flash across her face, because Simon steps closer. His levity falls away, and Claudia wonders if he has been carrying her voice in his head all these years. For a while, once, she was the only person who listened, who tried to help. She failed him, she knows, but the abrupt tension in his posture tells her he remembers all that used to simmer between them, and how much it might mean for her to know that he’s okay.

“Hey,” Simon says, looking firmly into her eyes. “It’s been good. I’ve been good. Getting away from all of that was the right call.”

Claudia nods, and has to blink back years of wondering. She wants, all of a sudden, to tell him about her clinic. About the girls she cares for, the women she helps find their way. She wants to tell him how much she doesn’t miss Homicide, how she doesn’t really know anyone else who would really understand.

She wants to tell him about the stupid trip to Thailand, how much she hated it.

“Buy you a drink?” she asks instead. It breaks the tension, but she doesn’t step back from him.

Simon purses his lips and gestures at their surroundings. “This is an alcohol-free retreat,” he says, a note of condescension creeping into his voice.

“Oh,” Claudia says, and maybe she needed a quick snap back to reality. No matter their complicated history, he’s her yoga instructor. She’s another anonymous client, a middle-aged woman to send home with a fantasy. She rocks back on her heels. “Sorry.”

Simon’s grin lights up his face with a round won. “I know a place,” he says, a familiar sly lilt in his voice. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

Claudia laughs and relaxes. She should have known it was just a feint. She should have trusted. Perhaps one day, she will be able to trust him again. Now, she gestures down to herself, head-to-toe Lululemon and sweat, and lets herself fall back into a long-forgotten rhythm of give-and-take. “What do I look like, a cop?” she asks.

“You can change if you want,” Simon says, and Claudia shrugs. It’s a beautiful summer afternoon, she has worn worse and weirder things to bars in her day. She shakes her head: she doesn’t want this strange moment to slip away.

“Nah,” Claudia says, with more ease than Simon has probably ever heard from her. “Let’s go.”

***


End file.
